“BEIJING — Call it a 21st-century version of Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy.

Three weeks after the FBI rolled out an odd, ripped-from-the-headlines microfilm about an American college student who was recruited to spy for Beijing, China has now released its own, very similar tales of young Chinese students being lured into espionage activities by foreign agents.

The student spying stories come as the U.S. is trying to encourage more Americans to study in China, and as China has become the biggest source of foreign students in U.S. colleges and universities.

The unusual FBI video effort, called “Game of Pawns: The Glenn Duffie Shriver Story,” was unveiled on its website in mid-April. Actors are used to re-create the tale of Shriver, a Michigan native who studied Mandarin in Shanghai in 2002-03 and was later approached by a woman, who went by the name of Amanda, who asked him to write some academic papers and paid him $120.

In the following months, Shriver later admitted, he learned that Amanda was working on behalf of the Chinese government. Shriver took some $70,000 from the woman and her associates over time, and eventually sought a U.S. government job with the aim of accessing classified information. Shriver pleaded guilty in 2010 and was released from federal prison at the end of 2013, a federal prison database indicates.

Shriver, who also appears in a prison interview at the end of the dramatized video, did not return calls seeking comments about the video.

This week, China’s state-run CCTV and the Global Times newspaper carried reports of what seemed to be mirror-image incidents of the Shriver case.

The Global Times said it had confirmed “over a dozen cases” in which Chinese students in China — including high school and college students — were being recruited by foreign intelligence agencies.

The outlets carried the most detail — including a jailhouse interview — about the case of a man surnamed Li who was sentenced to 10 years in prison, according to security officials in Guangdong province.

According to CCTV, Li was contacted over the social networking service QQ by someone purporting to be a woman around age 30. The two struck up an online friendship. But later, the woman revealed herself to be a man by the name of “Fei Ge,” who asked Li to order some journals from the national library.

Li was later asked to take pictures of military installations, earning $500 a month for his photos of ports and shipyards. He was convicted of passing at least 26 classified files and sentenced to 10 years in prison. . . .”